Climate Victims: Whales And Sharks

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The year 2020 set another horrible heat record in the oceans, which make up 99 percent of the planet’s biosphere, or, where life can exist. Many billions of our brethren and sistren, the animals, are already dead. It’s simply too hot.

The ocean heat is in lockstep with burning fossil fuels and wood pellets. In 2020, the world’s oceans absorbed the equivalent heat to dropping 10 Hiroshima atom bombs every second of the year (20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 {sextillion} joules).

Climate Victims
Since the 1990s the heat in the oceans has taken off as the amount of fossil fuel combustion has more than quadrupled.
Image credit: Kevin Trenberth

Allow me to remind you that the oceans drive Earth’s climate. Hence we are amid a worsening man-made climate crisis. It is never just about humans though. We share this glorious blue planet with a couple of million other life forms. All life is interrelated and we need everything that is left, alive.

Fossil fuel and wood pellet combustion heat is stoking the man-driven Sixth Mass Extinction.

Climate Victims
A whalepocalypse has begun and humans are the offenders.
Image credit: Jeff Chiu/AP

The Arctic is parboiling about three times faster than the rest of the planet. Gray whales that depend upon the Arctic sea ice to make a living are conspicuously wasting away. Gruesome.

It’s a cry of survival and nothing is exempt!”

Since 2019, along the west coast of North America more than 386 giant gray whales have washed ashore, emaciated and overwhelmed by whale lice. The actual number of dead grays could easily extend into the thousands since only 3.9 to 13 percent of grays that perish annually are found on land.

Gargantuan filter feeding whales, like grays, blues, fins, seis, humpbacks and others, are invaluable. They shepherd the sea and provide us, and all life forms, with oxygen as well as sequestering immense amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide and burying it along the seafloor. See The Gen Z Emergency for splendid details.

We need the whales alive and farming the sea. The fact that they are washing up skinny and dead is a terrifying omen.

Climate Victims
More and more of our marine brethren and sistren, gray whales, are washing ashore lifeless.
Image credit: Cara Field/The Marine Mammal Center

From the North Pole to the beleaguered Great Barrier Reef (GBR) nothing in the oceans escapes the deadly accumulating combustion heat. Three marine heatwaves over five years in the Coral Sea (NE Australia) have leveled the greatest collection of corals and all life therein. Aussie researchers now say that fossil fuel and wood pellet ocean heat causes epaulette shark pups to emerge from egg cases earlier, weaker, undernourished, smaller and exhausted.

“Sharks are important predators because they take out the weak and impaired and keep the integrity of the population strong,” remarked oceanographer Dr Jodie Rummer, James Cook University, Australia.

Climate Victims
Hammerhead sharks use their wide heads to trap stingrays by pinning them to the seafloor.
Image credit: Michael Mueller

The GBR sharks are the gatekeepers of ~1,600 miles of exquisite shoreline sea grass meadows, salt marshes and mangroves, which, by the way, store mega amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The loss of the sharks is yet another horrendous blow to Earth’s hallowed living interconnected biosphere – including eight billion procreating humans. No sharksNo life.

All hands on deck!

Climate Victims
Support the vital conservation work of SeaShepherdGlobal.org

Each of us is required to lend a helping hand to save our only home.

  •  The single biggest thing that you and your family can do, right this second to fight the climate crisis, is to switch to a plant-based diet, which protects the remaining old-growth forests, too (see The Gen Z Emergency for exact details).
  • Grow two food-bearing trees. Place wood chips around the base of each tree to conserve water, build soils and attract earthworms. Please do not use any man-made chemicals in your yard because we are missing more than 40 percent of the insects. Those scrumptious trees also feed the pollinators (as well as us too).
  • Make time to walk three miles daily. A healthy oxygenated body is the key for all of us to double-down our relentless efforts as green warriors for Mother Earth.

Make no mistake, the whales and the sharks are climate victims and without immediate action the human race is next. Climate action, in fact, begins with governments ending their annual $5.3 trillion fossil fuel subsidies, and embracing a global plan to achieve a zero-combustion global economy by 2030.

It’s a cry of survival and nothing is exempt!

#LoveNature

#LoveIsTheSolution

#Empathy

#Compassion

#ConsumeLess

#GrowFood

#GoVegan

#WalkMore

#TheGreatForestCase

#ZeroCombustionEconomy

#ForThePlanet#GenZEmergency

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Dr. Reese Halter

Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning broadcaster, distinguished conservation biologist and author.
Dr Reese Halter’s latest book is now available!
GenZ Emergency

Tweet @RelentlessReese

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